To bounce or not to bounce; that is the question (again)
Alexander Obenauer tells one of those seductive stories 
which has come up once or twice before and which you wish could be true for everyone.
He says,
I was playing with the customize toolbar feature in Mail.app when I saw a button labelled “Bounceâ€. After using the bounce feature on the tens of spam I get daily for 3 days, my inbox is spam free. Incredible.
An email given the bounce treatment in Mail.app gets returned to the sender as if it were undeliverable. And, so the theory goes, sees your email address removed from the spammer’s database.
Rather than repeat what I suggested last time, Ray (in the comments to Alexander’s post) puts the other side:
I thought about this technique about five years ago. Here are my conclusions: Not all spammers remove you from their list if they receive a bounce message. Most spam uses a bogus From address, so your bounce will most likely end up in someone else’s inbox.
I like a good silver bullet. This is far from it.
So, to bounce or not to bounce?
Apple’s own tech note on bouncing draws a distinction between bouncing messages from commercial mass mailings (useful) and bouncing spam (not so useful). Maybe it’s not a simple “yes” or “no” answer.
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November 20th, 2006 at 11:25 pm
I don’t think bouncing messages helps that much.. .I have an e-mail address that started gettting a lot of SPAM about 2 yrs ago when I accidently used it for a newsgroup posting. My mail provider (at the time) allowed me to shut down that e-mail address so *all* messages to that e-mail address would bounce. After a year of bouncing messages I activated the e-mail address again and the SPAM started flowing.
I’ve also tried solutions like ’sp@mx’ where SPAM messages are reported to the ISP’s. I used a custom e-mail address to report the SPAM messages, an address that was used for no other purpose. I started getting SPAM on that address.
November 20th, 2006 at 11:27 pm
It definitely is not a simple yes or no answer, although it can help in many cases, notably with “legitimate” SPAM: messages from reputable companies that seem to never get around to unsubscribing you or, worse, have lost track of your address in their database – it does happen a lot.
I did confirm with the Mail team at a time that they did not add “Bounce” to the rules in the original versions of Mail out of fear that people would automatically bounce all junk, which could cause email flood loops.
- FJ
November 21st, 2006 at 9:23 am
Ack!
I get “spam bounces” all the time from mail that I did not send out. Spammers use FAKE addresses for the From address.
This is a very bad suggestion, except where you think there is a real, solid, cares-about-bounces company at the other end. Most of the time you’re just doubling the amount of junk crossing the Internet and the spammer never sees your bounce. Instead, YOU are becoming a spammer. Don’t do it.
November 22nd, 2006 at 6:41 am
I agree with Mr. Shockley above. DON’T BOUNCE SPAM. I receive hundreds of bounced email every day because of spammers who spoof my domain.